A wealthy but incapacitated old man whose depiction is more edifying than amusing, as impressionable young children are led away from the brutal scarring of smallpox. Note the young lackey poised to lance the pustules. Excerpt from an accompanying text: “Strike the face! is also the battle cry of smallpox: the nose, the mouth, and the eyes are found by it as if cast into a mold, and one hardly cares to run the chance of a revision, the results of which are so clearly planned. It is true that if the smallpox comes to deprive you of an eye, to make you deaf in an ear, it will take care to enlarge your nose, to thicken your lips, to enlarge your mouth, and thus establish a balance between profits and losses.”
(Charles Aubry et al., Album comique de pathologie pittoresque, recueil de vingt caricatures médicales, Paris, 1823, via Wellcome Collection)
Sic Transit Pestilentia 